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Apple is bad at naming things consistently

Jan Tißler
11 min readSep 13, 2019

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Phil Schiller unveiled the “Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max”. A weird name, but at least they seem to have an idea about a naming system for different iPhone models going forward–until they change their minds again. (Photo: Apple)

First things first: Apple is of course one of the consumer electronics companies, that understand the importance of good, memorable names for their devices und services. Even the company name “Apple” itself is an example of that: It is supposed to sound familiar and friendly and not techie or cryptic.

And, yes, Apple does a lot of things well and right.

But naming conventions are not part of that.

iPad

The iPad has one of the most chaotic naming “systems” of all Apple devices. The company just can’t decide what to call their most important tablet and if they want to add a number to discern generations or not…

It started out pretty simple: The original “iPad” got its successor in the “iPad 2”. But the next two were again just named “iPad” (“The new iPad” for marketing purposes).

To mark a change in design, the main iPad became the “iPad Air”. That name sounded familiar because of the well known MacBook Air and made sense in that regard. What made less sense: The MacBook Air was an additional model and the iPad Air wasn’t. Anyway. The next one got a number again: iPad Air 2. After that, Apple scratched the “Air” and went back to “iPad” — without any number or other signifier. Than the iPad Air came back (without a number) and right now we have…

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Jan Tißler
Jan Tißler

Written by Jan Tißler

Independent Digital Journalist and Publisher. UPLOAD Magazin. USA/Deutschland

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